MP Bruce Flegg distances himself from Gerard Baden-Clay, saying he had no ‘inkling’ of murderer’s evil

Allison Baden-Clay: A missing person like no other5:15

In a special feature, journalists from The Courier-Mail reflect on the case of Allison Baden-Clay.

July 15th 2014

3 years ago

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GOVERNMENT MP Bruce Flegg has insisted he had no “inkling” of wife-killer Gerard Baden-Clay’s hidden darkness – a man he took to an Eric Idle concert at the height of the farcical Liberal leadership row in 2007.

Dr Flegg, who was called as a witness during Baden-Clay’s trial, said the pair mainly knew each other through the now-convicted murderer’s involvement with the local Chamber of Commerce.

He stopped well short of calling him a friend and said the evil that enabled him to kill his wife was “very well covered up”.

“We certainly had a friendly relationship and I think most people that had dealings with Gerard (did) – obviously there are things that have come out that nobody would have even imagined and it would be quite shocking to anyone who knew him,” he said.

The trial heard Baden-Clay begged to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars from Dr Flegg on separate occasions in 2011 and 2012 in a desperate bid to avoid bankruptcy, but was refused.

The two lived in the same suburb, with Dr Flegg dealing with Baden-Clay’s real estate agency to handle some of his property affairs, although “not with him personally”.

But he, like many others, caught no glimpse of the violent nature that would ultimately land Baden-Clay behind bars.

“I certainly didn’t see any inkling of it,” Dr Flegg said. “I saw none of it – none of it at all. There are many other people that I know that knew him as well, or better than I did … I’m not aware of any of them that got an inkling of it. So it was very well covered up.”

Dr Flegg said he was surprised at just how well Baden-Clay concealed his nature.

“Certainly a lot of the dark things that have come out in evidence were in no way apparent – to perhaps a surprising extent,” he said.

He said he believed the two had never “shared a private meal together”, saying: “I didn’t know where he lived; he’d never been to my house, I’d never been to his.”

Dr Flegg did, however, invite Baden-Clay to an Eric Idle performance in December 2007.

“We did once go to a show together,” he said, later recalling that it was Idle’s 2007 show, the comic oratorio Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy).

“I was at a Chamber of Commerce meeting and I had these two tickets and I thought ‘Oh well, it’d be a pity to waste tickets’ and I said to him ‘Why don’t we just go to the show?’.

“So it’s probably the only real one-on-one thing that I ever did with him.”

The British comedy icon’s 2007 Brisbane show famously coincided with the bitter stoush that toppled Dr Flegg as Liberal leader.

Idle even reportedly incorporated Flegg-related gags into his performance – the same show the MP and Baden-Clay attended together – and invaded a press conference to jokingly offer his services as the new Liberal leader. Asked what he thought of the leadership fight being labelled “Pythonesque”, Idle said: “I think that’s slightly insulting to Monty Python, don’t you?”

Dr Flegg – who at the time of Allison’s murder lived about 1km from the Baden-Clays – has also addressed the screams he testified to having heard on the night of April 19, 2012.

He said he never imagined at the time that they were connected in any way with the troubled couple.

“Absolutely not, no – for a start, their home was really a bit too far from mine and as I said in evidence, I don’t believe for a minute that what I heard came from that distance,” he said.